The Coren Group gets better grip on feed with the NutriOpt On-site Adviser

Since its establishment over 50 years ago, the Coren Group, the largest agro-food cooperative in Spain has grown to become the largest agro-food cooperative in their home country, while expanding its commercial offering to over 55 countries. Coren has seven production centres with monthly output topping 80,000 metric tons of compound animal feed (conventional and organic). Within the cooperative, Coren owns pig, poultry, veal, rabbit and beef operations and has one production line for organic pork, eggs and poultry.

Improve and innovate

The team at Coren is always on the lookout to improve, innovate and be part of new digital solutions in agriculture. The Spanish cooperative has been working with Trouw Nutrition for many years, not only by using their animal feed offering, but also to get access to feed related digital solutions such as portable feed analysis methods. We talk to Braulio de la Calle Campos, ruminant Technical Director at Coren about how the portable NIR scanner - the NutriOpt On-site Adviser from Trouw Nutrition - has changed the way of working with incoming raw materials for their compound feed production. The NutriOpt On-site Adviser offers real-time analysis by using a Near Infrared spectrometer (NIR sensor) in the form of a hand-held scanning device. After scanning the samples, the hand-held scanner sends all data to the mobile application, which creates a nutritional report of the scanned raw material, using the NutriOpt calibration lines and its nutritional database.

Increase agility and efficacy

“We do have our own lab and NIR equipment at our feed plants but around three years ago we started with the NutriOpt On-site Adviser to complement our current way of testing, reduce the costs involved in analysis, and to increase agility and efficiency of our veterinarians and nutritionists', De la Calle Campos explains. He continues: “The incentive to start using this solution was our confidence in the people of Trouw España and in Trouw’s excellent track record for collaboration. On top of that we notice that more than ever, our customers are demanding competitive prices, higher sustainability values, and reduced use of animal medication during production. The use of the NutriOpt On-Site Adviser is very easy to use and the nutritional reports helps us to advise on feed formulations and to enrich the key decision-making processes. It therefore perfectly fits Coren’s long-term strategy including being agile and effective, setting ourselves apart from the competition, improving technical results, cost reduction and sustainability”.

Value for organic feed business

De la Calle Campos explains that the use of the portable scanner is mainly used to test the forages in the field and the organic feed ingredients. “We used to send the forage samples to an external lab and we will continue to do so, but thanks to the NOA we have reduced the amount of samples that we have to send for external NIR analysis. In the organic part of our business, it is helping us to gain greater insight into organic feed ingredients. And due to the potential huge variety, especially in the organic protein ingredients, we check all the batches. By using the NutriOpt On-site Adviser we can check more frequently and be more efficient. This helps us to improve our formulation of organic diets”, De la Calle Campos says.

Getting the most out of it

The NutriOpt On-site Adviser is a cost-efficient way to get insights on the nutritional value of on-farm raw materials such as grass and maize. For Coren this means that they have a tool available to make the most of the value of feed data. “Especially the combination of using the On-site Adviser, the related NutriOpt insights and reports, the connection with our Fass software and training for our staff is a way to get most out of a digital feed solution, as offered by Trouw Nutrition. The unique combination is what makes the difference, especially when we opt for giving (precision) feed advice in specific situations such farms with milking robots. It helps us to increase ration efficiency by better balancing between dairy production and milk quality on the one hand and competitive results and sustainability requirements on the other”, De la Calle Campos explains.

Emerging technology

Coren is planning to continue to use the NutriOpt On-site adviser in the future. De la Calle Campos: “It is emerging technology that is here to stay for the long term, and it still has a lot of scope for further improvement. I don’t look only at what it can do today, but also at potential further development in the short term and integration of the data it produces in the feed formulation matrix”.